It snowed last night. Then that snow melted, and now the molten snow has once again frozen, and I’m treated to the dulcet tones of people in FWD vehicles examining the merits of “my tires are slipping — give it more gas!”
I guess I don’t really expect the ugly bag of mostly water from across the street to understand vehicle dynamics, anti-squat, and slip ratios, but I’m shocked by the number of otherwise mentally competent individuals I meet who don’t seem to give a single solitary fuck about the condition of their cars’ tires.
Listen up, y’all: Your car responds to your control inputs rather than careening into oncoming traffic if and only if the four little patches of rubber between it and the road, each about the size of a small child’s footprint, behave as they should. Worn-out summer tires designed to channel a few mm of water at 20degC are going to prove themselves woefully inadequate to the task of dealing with 8mm of ice crystals on top of a chaotic ice-water-tarmac interface at -5degC, which is probably about the temperature where your summer tires are thinking they’d rather not be viscoelastic but would prefer to turn into hilariously inefficient ice skates.
Blunt Object 
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